Tom Hardy Soars in His Most Captivating and Terrifying Role Ever

Though he doesn’t do it exclusively, Tom Hardy is exceptionally good at playing weirdos. Bane is a weirdo, Mad Max is a weirdo (he is mad, in the Hatter sense), and Venom is one of superhero fiction’s great weirdos. But it was relatively early in Hardy’s acting career that he gave an incredible performance in the role of terrifying real-life weirdo Charlie Bronson. Now that movie, Nicolas Winding Refn’s fascinatingly intense and bizarre Bronson, is brutally beating its way up the streaming charts on HBO Max.

Released in 2008, Bronson has a 75 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and was an early international hit for cult-favorite Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn. It just recently landed on HBO Max, and it’s steadily climbing the streamer’s top 10 list (according to FlixPatrol). It’s outperforming crowd-pleaser The Notebook and approaching Oscar winner The Shape of Water and this year’s Oscar favorite Sinners.

What Is ‘Bronson’ and Why Is It So Bizarre?

Image via Vertigo Films

Loosely based on the real life of British prisoner Charlie Bronson (not the actor, but named after the actor), Bronson follows the man as he goes from a kid who enjoys getting into fights at school to a man who… still enjoys getting into fights all the time. Bronson spends many years in various prisons and psychiatric institutions, often in solitary confinement, and he comes to enjoy the lack of societal structure in prison — he thinks of it like a stay in a hotel.

Still, despite his violent outbursts and love of fighting, he insists that he has never actually killed anyone and that his goal in life isn’t to hurt people. He actually wants to be famous for doing something special, and eventually discovers that art is just as satisfying an outlet for his emotions as fighting is. Or at least that’s the case for a while.

It’s a good story, which is why the real guy is a bit of a celebrity, but there are two absolutely brilliant ideas that push Bronson over the top: The first is that the plot is presented sometimes as stripped-back prison interviews that Hardy is giving as Bronson about his life and other times as a one-man show that Bronson is presenting onstage in front of a live audience. In the interviews, he wears a prison uniform and is darker and more straightforward. In the stage show, he sings, wears face paint, and cracks jokes about the horrible stuff he’s doing and/or experiencing. It's a little like what Joker: Folie à Deux wished it had been.

The second brilliant idea is that Hardy plays Bronson like he’s in a comedy — but it’s not that Hardy is in a comedy, it’s that Bronson himself is in a comedy. The whole thing is a show for him, and whether he’s punching a bunch of dudes for money in an underground street fight or antagonizing prison guards just so they’ll lash out, it’s all a performance. The whole movie is his presentation of his own life story, and Hardy’s work as the bald, mustachioed fighter is just absolutely fascinating (a dramatic foreshadowing of why his work in The Dark Knight Rises and Fury Road and Venom is so memorable). And, for a movie that is dark and brutally violent, it is also genuinely pretty funny.

Bronson is currently streaming on HBO Max.

Release Date October 9, 2008

Runtime 92 minutes

Director Nicolas Winding Refn

Writers Brock Norman Brock

Producers Allan Niblo, James Richardson, Kate Ogborn, Nick Love, Rupert Preston, Thor Sigurjonsson, Jane Hooks, Rob Morgan, Simon Fawcett, Danny Hansford, Paul Martin, Sean Faughnan, Suzanne Alizart